Question

The five key goals of the operations manager are to reduce costs, reduce variability and improve logistics flows, improve productivity, improve quality of customer service, and continuously improve business processes. Describe from your work as a HOSPITAL OPERATION MANAGER how you have observed someone manage an operation that achieved all or many of the goals of an operations manager. Give some examples of how some lacking areas could be improved. Be sure to support your conclusions with facts from the readings and/or video assignments by linking theory to practice in your comments by relating your personal perspective with the information you have read or watched.

Answer 1

The first goal, a manager has achieved and is observed, is the improved level of the customer service offered to the patients in the hospital. It is done by identifying the gap among the employees such as nurse and other staff regarding the lack of knowledge of different culture, language and belief systems. Here, adequate behavioral and cultural training is provided to employees to become more caring and understand the problems of the patients. It has resulted into the improved level of customer service. The second goal achieved by the manager, is to improve the productivity & efficiency among the employees in the hospital. It is done by the strategic approach to train the employees in stress management, time management as well as offer superior incentives if they deliver the benchmark performance. Besides, the promotion of informal meeting such as family get-together motivates the employees to coordinate well that improves the productivity. The third goal achieved by the manager is to reduce variability and it is done by the effective planning of resources, provisions for the contingencies and offering adequate training to the employees regarding the standard operating procedures so that variation is eliminated. As a result, constancy level increases and variation in performance is wiped out.
Though there are area of the improvement. The first area is to reduce the cost that can be done by the elimination of waste. Here, the lean sigma of quality management is used to eliminate different types of waste. It will also help to improve the business process and bottlenecks will be removed. So, with an application of lean sigma, cost is reduced, and the processes are reorganized to improve the productivity. Therefore, it is very important to apply in a hospital setting to achieve the remaining goals.